


the same thing

by prufrock



Category: Mad Max Series (Movies)
Genre: Angst, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-02
Updated: 2015-09-02
Packaged: 2018-04-18 14:11:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,423
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4708883
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/prufrock/pseuds/prufrock
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What she knows, she knows because she pushed.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the same thing

It’s not every day she sees something alive out here, so when the fox skips across her path, she lets her tires skid in the soft baked earth and stands breathing hard, straddling the bike to watch it wander out across the dunes. Fox is the closest name she can give the thing, anyway. She suspects even twenty years back nobody would’ve given this waddling, mangy lump of bitten ears such a healthy designation. 

She doesn’t think she hit it—she’s not yet perfectly used to the weightless intensity of the bike after years on machines hundreds of times her size, and she feels everything. Every bump, every stone she drives over, every wrinkle in the face of the desert, all telegraphed through her tense body as clearly as if she ran her palm straight across the sand. If she’d so much as clipped that ugly tail she’d have known instantly. She stops anyway, squinting across the hot sand to see the pathetic thing limp into the distance. It vanishes in silence, a shadow and then nothing, scraping its own slow painful way through the waste towards water or food or shade. She doubts it’ll find any, but she’s been wrong before. 

She’s stopped as much to give herself a rest as to watch the creature crawling away. She prefers not to admit it, even in the privacy of her own brain, but her body still hasn’t returned to what it was before everything happened. The place at her side is still a dull, nearly constant ache, worse in the mornings and late at night but never quite vanishing, and right now, after hours sailing the harsh wind she makes scouting on the bike, every breath is a small fire kindling in her lungs and sighing through her chest and arms and throat. She ought to turn back; she’s not doing herself any favors by going on. But what’s back there is too much noise and the wrong kind of silence in a place that was never supposed to be anybody’s home, and Furiosa will take the pain in her chest and side and arms over all of that, any of it. So she wipes grease and salt off her upper lip and grips the handlebars, and lets her tiny engine sear a metallic streak through the dead waste. 

It’s a courtesy everyone provides the former Imperator that nobody has yet mentioned how unnecessary these scouting trips are these days. In the first days after they took back the Citadel, the last of the Vuvalini led out the scouts for weeks to the site of the last crash, to bring back parts and bury the dead. That was weeks ago, everything cleared up and leveled off long before she woke from her endless dream in the room off the gardens. They shot the last stragglers of Joe’s war party before she could even walk. She knows all of this because they told her, and now she spends every day she can on a bike, tracing their old tracks even though there’s nothing left to find. Every time, she arcs farther away from the Citadel into awful, dazzling peace. 

She knows, because she was told—standing stubbornly in the middle of the sickroom wrapped in a scratchy blanket, trusting her lifeless knees long after she should have listened to Capable and sat down. She knows that she yelled, though not at whom. She remembers suffocating, but not how she came to be breathing again. 

She’s coming in sight of the pass now, the familiar blackened, gutted body of the rig sprawled across the mouth of the wreckage like the gigantic creatures heaved out of the sea as it died years ago. She’s been here a thousand times already, knows the outline of wasted metal perfectly against a sky of any color—today, a faintly acidic orange, empty enough for the moment. She’s been through the wreckage more times than she can count, and the Vuvalini before her, so she knows there’s nothing to discover, but she stops the bike anyway and gets off, dragging herself up over sun-brittle sandstone to get at the dead guts of the truck. She stands at the top to wheeze a moment into the silence, one palm burnt and stinging, the other a prickling ghost.

At the foot of the rocks, the rig lies shattered in the sand, huge and ridiculous. She thinks she ought to feel strange, maybe, walking through the mutilated body of what, for a while, was the thing she might have come closest to calling hers, but there’s no regret here. Just sand and metal. Just the old smell of grease that makes her slightly sick even as it puts her at ease. Everything else disappeared while she was asleep. 

She would swear—would swear like it meant her life or death—that she remembered coming to the Citadel. She can feel it all: a strong arm across her back, the almost breeze rushing past her hot cheek as the lift rose, a dark beaten head dissolving into the crowd. She clung to that moment all through the dreams, a fixed point in the darkness, but when she woke and staggered out to see the world remade they told her different. The arm at her back had been Capable’s, the dark head just another nameless survivor of the waste come to see Immortan Joe ripped to morbid souvenirs. Not him. He was never on the lift with her; he never came back from the pass. 

They told her, too, that he had a name. 

She sits down in the curved shade of the rig’s blasted body, settling on soft rust to watch the sky blur. There’s a faint cluster of black flecks on the horizon, carrion birds circling, and she prays they don’t decide to come hunting for supper in the picked-over skeleton of her rig. For the moment, they stay in the distance. Dropping her eyes from the burnt sky, she turns over her palm and flexes it gently, watching bright blood start from the scraped patches. It hurts more than it should. 

What she knows, she knows because she pushed.

The Dag told her, on her hands and knees in sticky dirt, that he wouldn’t let anyone pull the needle out. She thought Furiosa’s name for him was much better. Furiosa can’t remember any of this, but the picture formed perfectly in her brain while the Dag talked: this tiny desperate scuffle in the cramped cab, the fool’s shorn head bumping the low roof, his heavy hands defending the awkward tangle of tubing against women too tired to argue with feral. She thought, as she eased herself down to pluck loose a few tough weeds with her good hand, she could almost imagine his slow breath on her cheek in the flashes of light and memory that traced their journey home. That’s imagination, though. She knows his body was off the rig before they came in sight of the towers.

“It just happened quick,” the Dag shrugged, wrestling a stubborn root. “He said he was resting, I think. Then they said he was cold.” She frowned, biting her lip and leaning into the struggle, mud streaked up to her elbow. “Just the same thing, I guess, without the snoring.” 

Furiosa bends down and scoops up a clod of orange earth, letting it fall to pieces through her stiff fingers. The pain in her chest hasn’t abated. There are times when she wonders if it ever will, and knowing that she wondered the same thing years ago makes no difference at all. 

Cheedo was the one who told her where to find him. There are so few landmarks out here, almost nothing to trace a route by, but she remembered, tucking her hair behind her ear and sketching a map in the air with her hands. She offered to go along, maybe thinking it was company that was needed, but Furiosa shook her head. She didn’t ask so she could drive out there—what would she do? She asked because she needed to know, and she does, and in all of these weeks she’s never veered off to the south to see the earth scooped in long dark patches over her stranger’s bones. 

Instead, she sits in the dirt and lets the shadow of the rig fall over her as the sun boils down in the sky, and listens to his blood thundering in her ears, ringing out against the silence with perfect clarity.

**Author's Note:**

> Written as a fill on the Mad Max kink meme on Dreamwidth: http://madmaxkink.dreamwidth.org/450.html?thread=1125314#cmt1125314


End file.
